Overcoming the challenges of Cold Emailing

Introduction to the Challenges of Cold Emailing

Getting clients from a cold email can be very difficult. We’ll show you how to overcome these challenges and difficulties so you can grab clients easily!

Overcoming the cold emailing challenges will help you build a successful business with a cost-effective marketing strategy.

How does cold emailing really work?

Cold emailing is a process that involves sending relevant and appealing emails to potential clients that you’ve never personally met. It’s a brilliant sales tactic that has been used by many businesses for decades. The cold emailing process involves basic tools & technical knowledge and also involves a creative as well as an innovative mind. Keep in mind that you are not the only one who has approached the prospect with a cold email and the prospect is used to getting these kinds of emails. Thus, you need to ensure that your cold approach stands out of the crowd and provides value and is aimed at solving an issue being faced by the potential client.

1. You’re sending an email out because you want to help their business grow and also to improve their search rankings, grow online visibility, exposure and the enhance their conversions.

This is why it’s so important to know your potential client, build a connection and understand their issues before making a sales pitch.

How to write Cold Emails from start to finish Tips

1. Send the email to the business owner or the person in charge.

2. Before approaching a prospect, you need to do your background investigation on the targets business, problems and things they may have tried so far.

3. You can start with creating a list of potential clients with their details and then choose a few names from your list. Now, start your investigation process on them. You can search for information and data like their education (LinkedIn), how they get business, their marketing strategy, and also their weaknesses compared to competitors. You can also stalk them on their social media platforms to know more about their business.

Where do I find potential clients/Prospects?

You can find potential clients using a simple Google search or even find them on social media platforms. After identifying the companies you want to contact you need to understand who the boss and decision maker is. This tends to vary based on the company size. In small businesses, the boss can also be the decision maker (founder) but in larger organizations, these tend to be separate (e.g. Boss = CEO/CMO and Decision Maker = Digital Marketer.) Simply put, the decision maker is the person who would contact you for your services and is instructed by the boss to choose wisely.

Often times, it can be hard to reach people higher up in a larger organization. You will often run into the gatekeeper. A way to avoid this problem is to find a direct email to the boss and decision maker.

How do I get in contact with my prospects?

I know here it says ‘cold email campaign,’ but don’t limit yourself to just email. Whilst email is a great way to get into contact with others, conversing through social media works very well. These are cold approaches. With each channel, it works a little differently (keep that in mind!)

How can we start this relationship?

How can I gain a conversation with a prospect? Although we’re offering SEO services and can mention improvements in ranking, there are a wide variety of Web Issues you can open the conversation with:

• Website Recommendations
• Coding errors with the website design
• Security problems with a website
• Crawling & indexing issues
• Poor search engine rankings
• Help with keyword research

Remember there’s no pitching involved just yet! Just like how you wouldn’t propose on your first date, don’t expect your client to buy from you immediately. This is where 99.9% of people fail. Most people try to close immediately and there is no conversation between both parties. Build rapport and create a conversation.

If you can find a way to add value by informing and educating your prospect on your domain expertise, you’re opening the conversation on a positive note.

One approach that works well for me includes:

• Find the problem being faced by the prospect
• Make them aware of the issue
• Provide the solution in a detailed and simple manner
• Be polite and patient.

We do not want to:

• Send bulk random emails without the name
• Sell and Upsell
• Focus on closing the deal quickly
• Reject rapport building

This leads to mistrust and pushes our prospects further away. It’s clear that everything is a numbers game and no client wants to feel like a number on a spreadsheet.

Remember: People buy from those who they can relate to. People make emotional purchasing decisions which they then try to rationalize.

Why is the cold approach generally difficult?

We previously discussed the importance of mindset. It’s important to understand how your client is thinking.

With cold approaches, your prospects can feel:

• Irritated
• Bewildered
• Dubious
• Resentful
• Puzzled
• Motivated

Unfortunately, the reaction is mainly negative due to the email spammers. In order to enter a conversation, we need to disable the negative thoughts and feelings, the lack of trust so that our prospects can enter into a conversation with us.

How can we do this?

By tailoring our email message. Your prospects are people and people buy from others they can relate to.

For Example:

When I craft an email I drop down all these important points about myself:

• My name is John
• I am 30 years old
• I have a foodie and an adventure traveler.
• I am an American
• I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• I am an SEO specialist and digital marketing expert.

The idea is to show your client who you are. This is super important. Who you are and your message should link together. Unlike the Overseas Outsourced SEO company, your message would be a stark contrast to their templated, automated emails. Yours is specific and it outlines who you are as a person, building trust and rapport. Here, I also reveal my vulnerabilities. I often tell my clients that I am a consultant as opposed to an agency and therefore cannot carry out every task possible. This is why my clients are very precise and fall into a niche.

After I Introduce myself, what do I do?

As the prospect understands who I am, I provide them value through my expertise. It’s important to educate the prospect without destroying them in the process. (Don’t tell someone that their website sucks and you can help them – Their wife could have built that website!) I recommend co-relating with the prospect of finding something that you have in common.

Why are you contacting them? Why do you think you should connect?

Then I provide them with great value by:

• Identifying the problem very clearly
• Explain why this problem is an issue
• How you or someone else can solve this issue

By allowing them to solve this problem themselves you build a lot of trust! in many cases, they have someone else solving these problems for them already.

Finally, to end the email have a call to action.

It’s completely okay to ask for interest. You’re not pitching! You’re simply asking whether it’s okay to continue the conversation elsewhere.

Note: This message should NOT be super long. Make it short and concise.

With this approach, I advise you start sending out 10 – 15 emails per day. These emails are not designed for mass reach and easy automation but rather more personalized and tailored to the people you would like to enter conversations with.

What can I offer my prospects?

After your prospects are curious and engaged, you can provide further value to demonstrate yourself as a domain expert in this field. This involves generating their curiosity or instilling fear.

How can I trigger curiosity?

We can provide:

Note: Make sure you measure key metrics

How many emails are you sending per day

• Open Rate
• Click through rate
• Reply Rate
• Cose Rate

It’s very important that you go through all of these steps. You need to create and craft a bond between the prospect. Not all prospects will behave in the same way.

What to avoid!

When you receive a cold email you’re probably thinking…. another guy trying to sell me something.

We want to avoid being:

• ‘That’ annoying sales guy
• Getting into the flagged spam list
• Gaining Zero trust from potential clients
• Sounding like overseas SEO outsourced companies

We can avoid all of this by creating ‘interest’ by creating a unique approach.
Interesting ways to capture attention include:

• Sending a video email
• Being super funny
• Never seen before style emails (Be creative!)
• Amazing Proposition (No brainer – No Risk, Huge value, Crazy Proposition)

Note: If you cannot deliver, do not make a crazy proposition!

How to clean up a Scrapped Contact List

A scraped contact list is a file that contains a large number of contact details gathered by a software. This is a faster approach to finding contacts for your cold emails.

Here is an example:

As you can see, there are blank areas on the list. The first and last name section is also not properly provided. You have some cleaning up to do here. Here are the following steps on cleaning up a scrapped contact list.

 

STEP 1:

Check the domains first. Make sure all websites are working.

Avoid websites with the ff. domain suffix:

• .gov – government
• .edu – educational
• .org – organizations/charity
• Also, avoid websites that contain adult content (e.g. pornography)

STEP 2:

Make sure the company name (name of the website) is correct

STEP 3:

Check the most important details

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email

Sometimes the full name is already provided under the NAME section. All you need to do is separate them. If there is no name and email provided, follow the steps in ‘How to find contacts for cold emailing.’

Note: Make sure the emails are as close to the person’s name as possible. For example, Linda Hammond’s email is [email protected]. When you email her using that email address, she receives it directly.

If the email starts with info@ hello@ support@ sales@, those are general emails. It could possibly mean that many people who were assigned in the emailing task will be able to receive it. There is a big chance that your email will be ignored. So, if the provided email is a general one, use the STEP 7 of “How to Find Contacts for Cold Emailing”.

STEP 4:

Fix the format of the telephone section. Usually, scrapped details provide this format.

Here’s how to fix it:

• From – ph:+1-914-9845169—to— (888) 644 7795
• +1 means 0
• Remember: Only use 1 phone number.

STEP 5:

A way to check in BULK if the email is valid or not is to use email verification websites:

• https://neverbounce.com/
• http://www.mailboxvalidator.com/